The Mountain Goats originated with Darnielle writing songs on his guitar and recording them on a cheap boombox, an arrangement that sometimes represents the act still — just him, his guitar and his lyrics. It is, admittedly, a pretty simple formula, one you can find somewhere on a street corner in just about every city in the country (and on more than a few street corners in our little city). Darnielle transcends the sum of this simple equation, in both style and substance. The songs he has recorded and disseminated to the public exceed 500, and yet there isn't the dilution of quality one might expect from someone so prolific.

"It's fun, fascinating and a ridiculous amount of work to go from sitting back and letting a major label decide my fate to doing everything myself," said Mr. Kweller, who after 10 years on the major-label offshoot ATO Records will release his new album, "Go Fly a Kite," on Feb. 7 through his own label, The Noise Company. "We run our label like a mom-and-pop business. I feel like record labels shouldn’t be operated any differently than a shoe store or a bakery."

"Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough."